I have to say, traditional publishing has been getting me down lately. When Iâm anxious about something, when Iâm excited about something, when something means a whole lot to me, I research obsessively to cope. I think itâs my brainâs way of protecting itself, wanting to be as informed as possible about whatâs coming next. And there are a lot of long silences built into the traditional publishing process, waiting for the next thing to happenâlots of time to research! For me, that basically means: lots of time to give myself a complex.
The more I learn about peopleâs debut experiences, or peopleâs experiences over the longer run of publishingâI just have so much in my head now about how the path to success feels very narrow.
But then, I guess, the question of What even is success? comes to the foreground. It gets kind of existential, this question. Because I have a day job, and that gives me stability, and the luxury of not necessarily needing a specific outcome from publishing. (And, I mean, Iâve also kind of been grinding myself into dust, writing novels alongside a 9-5? I think Iâm lucky, on the whole, but if youâre in the same situation, I see you lolâitâs a lot! We both probably need a nap).
(Please donât misunderstand me: I am super grateful for everything thatâs happened to me so far. And please donât misunderstand me, in a different way: There is much about publishing that I think should be different, structurally. That there shouldnât be so much pressure on debut performance. That you shouldnât need a day job to make it work. That writing novels is real, serious work and I wish the job was formally structured to reflect thatâlike, that it came with health care. But maybe Iâll write more about that another day).
When it comes to thinking about how I can live in this world, as it is, for the next year or twoâthe best I can do to take care of myself is redefine my idea of success.
A lot of people say: I just want to get to do another book after this, because the performance of each book factors into whether youâre able to sell another one, afterward. Obviously, I would like that. Iâd like to keep writing books for a long time.
But it makes me anxious to peg my definition of success to something that depends on so many factors out of my control. (Lyssa Mia Smith wrote something really smart about âbroken goalsâ last year that I think about all the timeâtheyâre goals that depend on things out of your control).
Amid all these circular thoughts that get me down, something happened recently that kind of renewed my faith in the idea of reading and writing??
Someone by the name of âbigolas dickolas wolfwoodâ just very ardently and urgently tweeted about how much they love This Is How You Lose the Time War, and thousands of people chimed in about how much they love this book, and it suddenly rocketed up the Amazon charts.
I love basically everything about this. How very unhinged and joyful it is! How itâs a reminder of how strongly words on a page can resonate, improbably, across time and space, and actually mean something to someone else! I especially love this:
It justâI donât know!âit reminds me of how I want to be? And what I want writing to be about.
So for the time being, the idea of success I want to cling to, personally, is: the hope that I can someday, with a thing I wrote, make a single person feel as intensely as bigolas dickolas feels about Time War.
Obviously we donât have control of how other people feel, eitherâbut it feels like a more life-affirming hope to focus on, if not a goal. It points in the direction of being freer with writing again. Of playing around and getting creative and weird.
It points in a direction that makes me feel energized, that reminds me what I like about writing in the first place (and about reading, for that matter? That instead of fixating on what books were successful, I want to go back to thinking about the books that set my hair on fire). It points in a direction that makes me feel more excited about life. And because Iâm incredibly mature, it makes me giggle to think of bigolas dickolas energy as the shorthand reminder of all of this, in the future. Anyway!
Iâm going to close Substack and go back to writing, while Iâm still in the throes of this feeling. Also: Iâm probably going to write this newsletter less often lol! I know no one else is keeping track, but it might be more like once a month/however often I feel like it, going forward.
Hope youâre all doing great, and that, if tradpub is getting you down, you can channel some of this energy too. <3
Love always,
Clare